Communication is not built from pre-existing units. It does not take “information,” “utterances,” and “understandings” as raw materials, assembling them like blocks.

Rather, these components exist only within communication itself.

They are generated as communication unfolds, and vanish without it.

In an autopoietic communication system, the components — be they messages, symbols, or communicative acts, are not pre-existing entities waiting to be transmitted.

Instead, they emerge through the interactions within the system itself.

A communication system is completely closed.

It generates the very components from which it is made, through communication alone.

“A communication system is therefore a completely closed system

that creates the components out of which it arises through communication itself.

In this sense a communication system is an autopoietic system

that (re)produces everything that functions as a unity for the system through the system itself.

This means that the communication system itself specifies not only its elements,

whatever the ultimate units of communication are, but also its structures.

What is not communicated cannot contribute anything to it.

Only communication can influence communication.

Only communication can break down the units of communication

(e.g., analyze the selective horizon of information or seek the reasons for an utterance).

And only communication can control and repair communication.

Thus, there is no external source of communication.

No matter, no energy, no subject,

no perception, no consciousness can supply it from outside.

Communication grounds itself only in its own repetition.

It presupposes itself in order to occur.

It survives only by selecting, distinguishing, and re-entering its own operations.

“There are no building blocks of communication that exist independently and only need to be assembled by someone (a subject, perhaps?).

Instead it is a matter of different selections whose selectivity and selective domain are constituted by the communication itself.”

Intelligence, whether human or artificial,

is determined not by its physical substrate but by the knowledge structures that emerge within it.

The interest lies not in the “beacon” itself, but in the knowledge it conveys, and this knowledge is always constituted by selections.

No, it is not just a beacon. It reacts to our signals.

But it seems communication has no goal or end, no immanent entelechy.

It occurs or it does not; that is all that can be said about it.

Communication does not serve a final cause. It is neither teleological nor progressive.